::.. Timing ..::

:: 2003/08/01 ::

Feedback from Glen Hellman, Ikimbo CEO

Glen Hellman posted a comment on my recent entry re: Ikimbo. We had breakfast the other day, and Glen is very upbeat about the opportunities for Ikimbo which has just raised an additional $2M in venture funding. He is continuing to push ahead with the Agenda product line, an application that extends IBM Sametime. Agenda provides a means to structure real-time response to real-time events.

Agenda is a pretty cool idea, if I do say so myself. In the interest of full disclosure, I confess that a/ I worked at Ikimbo for two years, until leaving in February 2003, b/ my name is one of several on the patent application for the Agenda idea (although I have no idea about the status of the patent), but that c/ I have *no* financial interest in Ikimbo at this time. So when I say its cool, I am just patting myself on the back (we won a Lotus Advisor Award in January), rather than self-dealing.

The challenge with Agenda is -- as I told Glen this week -- the complexity of integration with the enterprise information infrastructure. On one hand, Agenda is integrated with Sametime, but not the myriad other IM solutions. And integration with -- to take only two sectors -- even a few CRM players or SCM players is a truly daunting task. I feel certain that whatever else Glen does, he will focus on a smaller number of integration points that Ikimbo attempted in the past.

:: Stowe Boyd 8/1/2003 10:10:05 AM [link] ::
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Jon Udell: iChat AV, iSight, and FlashCom

Read Jon Udell's piece: iChat AV, iSight, and FlashCom. I am happy that iChat AV -- audio visual services linked to the iChat network -- seems to work as advertised. But Apple doesn't solve the interoperability problem any better that AOL, Yahoo, or MSN.

I want to be able to chat (with or without video and voice) to anyone with an IP address on the Internet.

Leaving my tired diatribe aside, I am planning to get a webcam when I get back from the beach, and to launch Stowe TV!

:: Stowe Boyd 8/1/2003 09:50:21 AM [link] ::
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BAM -- Fly or Die?

I read a piece at Line56 by Scott Fingerhut of TIBCO, BAM -- Fly or Die?, and digs into the Gartner concept of Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). As usual, whenever I read something about BAM from vendors like TIBCO, I wonder why they never mention instant messaging, or more pertinently, presence management. Its theoretically all about real-time flow of critical business information to the appropriate people so they can more quickly take action, right?

:: Stowe Boyd 7/31/2003 11:07:45 AM [link] ::
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New Column at Darwin: Social Commentary

Go check out my new column at Darwin, charmingly dubbed "Social Commentary" by Editor Janice Brand. The first column is out as of this morning, on the topic of Swarm Intelligence, and I profile some technology formerly of CompanyWay, which was acquired by AskMe while the article was in press.

:: Stowe Boyd 7/30/2003 11:31:38 AM [link] ::
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Collaboration Explosion: The Rise of Communication Chain Management

Recent piece at InformationWeek by Tony Kontzer (brought to my attention by Hylton Jolliffe at Corante) highlights the explosion of technical advances that the leading collaboration players are making, and also prompts me to rant a bit about the near-term convergence of collaboration and business process technologies.

Does not get into great detail about the various technologies, providing snippets of info about Oracle Collaboration Suite (I am particularly intrigued by the workflow-ish features they are introducing, and the fact that they have not yet integrated IM: I am interviewing the VP of Development Friday, so next week I will know more), Groove's integration with TeamDirection (I have looked at it, but not in great detail -- basically it interoperates with Microsoft Project), Microsoft's chameleon-like name changing for the-technology-formerly-known-as-RTC (apparently now it will be called Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2003, instead of Real-Time Communications Server 2003 (I wrote about this endless name-changing recently)), an update from Lotus (which doesn't sound like anything new, really), and some new news from Documentum re: eRoom technology (supporting XML-based integration with enterprise applications).

The thread emerging from all these announcements is a very interesting one. Collaboration systems are intended to support various sorts of communication in a more structured, persistant (usually), and content-rich fashion than telephone or email interactions. (Some lump email in as a collaboration tool, but unless email is supported by a collaborative infrastructure like Exchange or Notes, it is only marginally collaborative.)

Historically, collaboration systems have been relatively unintegrated to the more-or-less automated information chains within large companies: supply chain systems, or CRM tools, for example. I have long argued that the increasingly structured "communication chain" than is enabled by collaboration tools (including real-time tools, like IM and web conferencing) should be, and soon will be, integrated to the underlying information chains that are the bloodstream of today's business.

What we see emerging in these competitors' solutions is exactly the lineaments of what is to come: XML-based linkage between the information chains (largely an application-to-application, or application-to-person interaction) and the communication chains (person-to-person interactions).

Email-based or pager alerting solutions have been around for decades, but what is now appearing is much, much richer.

Communication chain management -- channeling human communication through sophisticated collaboration frameworks, and cross-linking that to mission critical workflows -- will lead to a small 'r' revolution in business operations. This will be the place where real-time communication (IM and its cousins) becomes the primary mechanism of synchronous communication, driven by presence and availability management. Presence and availability will become threaded into the business rules that control the flow of information and decision making in the enterprise, and people can be brought together in real-time to respond to time critical events. Slow-time collaboration -- people working together asynchronously -- is equally important, and will likewise need to be linked to the underlying information flows of the business. However, the acceleration of business that arises from real-time collaboration will trump the benefits form better slow-time collaboration, so I expect that to be the most significant element in the rise of communication chain management.

:: Stowe Boyd 7/30/2003 09:23:12 AM [link] ::
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Email Dialog with Howard Liptzin, of Motime

Howard got the pointer I sent earlier today regarding my initial experience at Motime. His comments:

It was quite nice to have had the exposure on Instant Messaging Planet but it may have been just a touch too early. We are still working under hood, so to speak, to optimize the IM functions and what we call the event dispatcher.

So, yes, the site is currently *very very * slow because we are working on it as I write this. I’d be happy to let you know when we have completed this phase (in the next few days, I hope). When we finish dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s, we’ll officially launch.

I was really happy to read your take on the general issues with respect to personal publishing and instant messaging. It coincides perfectly with my thinking. I anxiously read the first reports of the AOL platform, along with everyone else, with its references to an IM integration. When I read, however, that all it is so far is an IM-2-blog interface, my reaction was “so what?” This is a redundant ability at best and, as Dave Winer has suggested, maybe even a bad idea. The care given to both writing style and content (and oh yes, you’re right, also spelling) in IM is well suited to the real-time experience, but much less so to a publishing format. Anyone who has ever had to slog through an unedited transcript of an IM conversation will immediately understand the problem of making it easier to post from IM... ;-)

OK, it may be nice-to-have feature, but not much more. And I do not look forward to seeing lots of lengthy blogged IM dialogs!

All of us who have tested the motime platform have also tested the range of other blogging tools. Our strongest reactions are that publishing on other systems just feels lonely compared to ours. Changing the direction of the flow, Blog-2-IM, makes using our platform a very “un-lonely” experience. That’s the key -- social experience.

In addition we are trying to build-in as many social aggregation tools as possible (subscriptions, invites, group blogs); this is a product aimed squarely at non-professional users and first-timers, in other words, just regular folks.

Sorry for being so long-winded, but I had to strain to stop myself here. Having just read your blog and company website, it is crystal clear that you have already intuited the logic of this integration and the myriad of other possibilities that it offers.

I’m delighted that you took the time to write to us and happier still that I have had the chance to make your online acquaintance. I’ll keep you informed of our progress, if you wish me to so. I’m sure that you would enjoy taking motime out for a spin!

Sincerely,
Howard

P.S. I am currently working in Italy, so please take the time difference into account in case of phone or IM contacts...
P.P.S. The Bill Seitz quote on your blog is true in about 99% of cases, imho. Very well put.

Howard -

I will fiddle with Motime this week, if I get a chance. Looking forward to talking at length, soon.

- Stowe



:: Stowe Boyd 7/28/2003 02:21:03 PM [link] ::
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Merger of Blogs and IM

Strangely enough, I haven't bumped into these companies, but was twigged to them by a recent article at Instant Messaging Planet: MindSay and Tipic.

Mindsay has built a complete blogging infrastructure and provides an AIM interface to allow the creation and posting of blog content. A nice feature, but not that exciting, really. Kind of like the Blogger feature that allows sending blog content through email, although I can imagine using the email interface more (which I have) since Outlook supports spell checking, and AIM doesn't.

Tipic is an instant messaging company, building enterprise IM on the Jabber (XMPP) protocol, with operations and most sales in Europe. Theoretically, they have launched a new service -- Mo'time -- that fuses blogging and IM in more signficant ways, including support for IM notifications of comments on blog entries, and readers can be notified by IM when new content is posted. This sounds cool, but when I tried to click from the Tipic website this morning (which seems to be running *very* slowly) the link provided for Mo'time (the obvious www.motime.com) didn't work -- the server must have been down. Now it seems to be up, but it is running *very very* slowly.

I plan to follow up with this service, and find out more. Sounds interesting.


:: Stowe Boyd 7/28/2003 08:29:59 AM [link] ::
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Ikimbo raises new round of funding, New CEO

I read in the Washington Post that Ikimbo (where I worked for two years -- which is another, long and convoluted story) has secured some new financing from Corss Atlantic Capital (a long time investor in the firm).

"Ikimbo, a Herndon communications firm, said it named Glen Hellman president and chief executive and landed $2 million in venture funding. Todd Bramblett, the current chief executive, is leaving to pursue other interests, the firm said. Hellman previously worked as president and chief operating officer of Astracon. Ikimbo said the funding round was led by Cross Atlantic Capital Partners and the Co-Investment 2000 Fund.

I plan to track down Glen this week, and see what the planis for Ikimbo. Last I heard, the company was pursuing a strategy of developing real-time applications that leverage the instant messaging infrastructure.

:: Stowe Boyd 7/28/2003 08:00:59 AM [link] ::
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